Ritchie and Thompson Receive National Medal of Technology from President Clinton

WASHINGTON, D.C. (April 27, 1999) -- Dennis Ritchie and Ken
Thompson of Bell Labs received the U.S. National Medal of Technology
today from President Bill Clinton at ceremonies televised at the
White House.

Ken Thompson (left) and Dennis Ritchie
receive the National Medal of Technology from President
Clinton.

During his introductory remarks, President Clinton said,
"I'd like to take just a moment to reaffirm something that is
obvious to all of you, but needs to be equally clear to your fellow
Americans. In an age when the entire store of knowledge doubles
every five years, where prosperity depends upon command of that
ever-growing store, the United States is the strongest it has ever
been, thanks in large measure to the remarkable pace and scope of
American science and technology in the last 50 years."

Ritchie and Thompson are the sixth and seventh individuals to
receive the National Medal of Technology in recognition of work done
at Bell Labs. The first National Medal of Technology awarded to an
institution was given to Bell Labs.

"The quality of life and economic strength that all
Americans enjoy is due to the vision and dedication of innovators
like those we honor here today with the National Medal of
Technology," Commerce Secretary William M. Daley said
yesterday. "These Medalists have earned our highest honor for
their work in creating life-saving practices and products, plants
that increase crop yields, and the basis for modern computer
operating systems and software."

The award, administered by the Commerce Department's Office of
Technology Policy, is the country's highest for achievement in
technology. It honors breakthrough concepts and inventions. Thompson
and Ritchie were cited for their invention of the UNIX* operating
system and the C programming language.

Both men also helped develop the Plan 9 and
Inferno(TM) operating systems, invented at
Bell Labs and introduced in 1995 and 1996, respectively. Most
recently, they have contributed to the development of Lucent's
PathStar(TM) Access Server, which provides
packet voice and data services.

The Medal citation describes their inventions as having "led
to enormous advances in computer hardware, software, and networking
systems and stimulated growth of an entire industry, thereby
enhancing American leadership in the Information Age."

"With UNIX and C, Ken and Dennis changed the way people
used, thought and learned about computers and computer
science," said Arun Netravali, executive vice president of
research at Lucent's Bell Labs. "Few people have had such
impact on their colleagues, on generations of students and on an
entire industry."

In a prepared statement at the time of the announcement last
year, Thompson and Ritchie said, "We are greatly honored by
this recognition of work that has continued over many years.
Although the world of computer and communications hardware and
software seems to change dramatically even month-to-month, there are
also long-lasting themes and approaches that continue to influence
the industry over the long term.

"We take this award to us as symbolic of the seminal
contributions of our immediate colleagues at Bell Labs during the
early days of the development of the UNIX system and the C language;
many of the most interesting ideas were not ours, but generated in
collaboration. Similarly, the acceptance of the software in the
commercial world, academia, and government owes jointly to the
support and work by Bell Labs development organizations, the
University of California at Berkeley, and DARPA. In more recent
years, the growth of the workstation industry, and most recently the
open-software movement, have drawn on these developments from the
1970s.

"The success and survival of UNIX and its related ideas over
nearly 30 turbulent years owe in great part to a symbiosis among the
commercial, academic and government communities. Another key
ingredient, though, has been the commitment of Bell Labs--under the
old Bell System, then with AT&T, and now in Lucent
Technologies-- to support of broadly-based research. Industrial
research, like all other kinds today, struggles to explore the right
paths leading both to 'Internet-time' performance and longer-term,
more fundamental discoveries.

"Bell Labs has, over many years, supported a broad program
of research that includes not only computer software and hardware,
but mathematics, many areas of solid-state physics and materials
science, radio technology, and even cosmology and the distribution
of matter in the Universe. This diverse excellence is the source of
much of the intellectual nourishment of Bell Labs researchers.
Happily, this support has led to products and tools useful to our
company, to the computer and communications industry generally, and
to society."

Much of the progress of computer hardware, software, and networks
during the past quarter century can be traced to Ritchie and
Thompson's creation of UNIX and C language.

Without operating systems, computer hardware is useless; before
UNIX, operating systems were large, vendor-specific, and designed to
cope with particular features of a given machine. UNIX was the first
commercially important portable operating system, usable almost
without change across the span of hardware from the smallest laptops
to supercomputers. It embodies visionary ideas -- deliberate
generality and openness -- that continue to be a strong force today.
Many of its approaches and notations influence the entire span of
operating systems.

The successes of UNIX are intertwined with C, the first
general-purpose programming language to combine the efficiency of
assembly language with high-level abstract expressiveness. Like
UNIX, C programs can move essentially without change from machine to
machine, eliminating the need for expensive, error-prone software
rewrites.

UNIX is the operating system of most large Internet servers,
businesses and universities, and a major part of academic and
industrial research in operating systems is based on UNIX. Most
commercial software is written in C or C++, a direct descendant of C
that was also developed at Bell Labs, or more recently Java, a C++
descendant developed at Sun Microsystems.

Ritchie and Thompson joined Bell Labs within a year of each
other, Thompson in 1966 and Ritchie in 1967. They worked closely
together for several years on the design and development of UNIX.
The C Language, in which the UNIX operating system is written, was
invented by Ritchie. It grew out of an earlier language, B, written
by Thompson.

Ritchie and Thompson had also worked on the Multics operating
system project, a collaboration of MIT, Bell Labs and GE, which
pioneered many of the ideas incorporated in UNIX. UNIX ultimately
eclipsed Multics, in part because of its portability and
adaptability to readily available computers.

Both Ritchie and Thompson are Bell Labs Fellows, an honor
bestowed for sustained and exceptional contributions to research.
Each has received numerous external awards, and they have jointly
received the ACM Turing Award, the IEEE Emmanuel Piore Award and the
Richard W. Hamming Medal.

Thompson is a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff in the
Systems Software Research Department. His research topics have
included operating systems, programming languages, and computer
games. With J.H. Condon, he developed a chess-playing computer,
"Belle," that won the U.S. and World Computing Chess
Championships in 1980.

He was a visiting professor at the University of California,
Berkeley, in 1975-76, and at the University of Sydney in Australia
in 1988. Thompson earned B.S and M.S. degrees in electrical
engineering from the University of California at Berkeley. He is a
member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy
of Engineering.

Ritchie heads the Systems Software Research Department. He has
worked on the design of computer languages and operating systems. He
holds a B.S. in physics from Harvard University, where he also
earned an M.S. and completed a Ph.D. thesis in applied mathematics.
He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Five other scientists have received the National Medal of
Technology for work done at Bell Labs: John Mayo in 1990, W. Lincoln
Hawkins in 1992, Amos Joel in 1993, and Richard Frenkiel and Joel
Engel in 1994. Bell Labs, itself, was the first institution to
receive the National Medal of Technology, in 1985.

Eleven scientists have received the Nobel Prize in Physics for
work done at Bell Labs, including most recently Horst Stormer,
Daniel Tsui and Robert Laughlin, winners of the 1998 prize. Two Bell
Labs scientists, Federico Capasso and Rudolph Kazarinov, this month
received the 1998 Rank Prize, the world's most prestigious award in
optoelectronics.